Fifteen Thousand Dollars and a Note That Vanished: The Case of Ashley Elaine Morris Mullis

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

December 8, 2023

Ashley Elaine Morris Mullis was twenty seven years old in September 2013, living in Royerton, Indiana, a small community in Delaware County. She stood somewhere between five foot four and five foot seven, weighing between a hundred fifteen and a hundred forty five pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes, a tattoo reading Ashton on her upper left arm and a small butterfly tattoo on her lower right leg. She was the mother of three children, two young sons from a previous relationship with her estranged husband, and a newborn daughter, only about two weeks old at the time she vanished, whose father was a married man named Daniel York Sr., a mechanic who also happened to own the rental home Ashley was living in.

On September 22, 2013, Ashley attended a family reunion in Royerton, an occasion that produced what would become the last confirmed photograph anyone has of her. She left the gathering that day and, as far as her family has ever been able to establish, was never seen or heard from again. When her parents were unable to reach her in the days that followed, they went to check on her in person, and found that a note they had left on her door earlier was gone, a small but unsettling detail suggesting someone had been there, or had taken it, sometime after they'd left it.

A Story About Virginia

When investigators and Ashley's family pressed Daniel York for information about where she had gone, his account centered on a sudden decision to relocate. According to York, Ashley had decided to move to Virginia and start a new life there, and he claimed he had personally given her fifteen thousand dollars in cash to help make that move happen. In this version of events, Ashley left her two older sons with their father and left her two week old daughter in the care of York and his wife, Sheila, before setting off for Virginia on her own.

Ashley's family found almost every part of that story difficult to accept. She had never mentioned any plan to move out of state, to anyone, at any point before her disappearance. The idea that she would leave behind not just her older sons but her newborn daughter as well, entrusting the infant to the wife of the man who had fathered her outside of his own marriage, struck relatives as entirely out of character for a woman they knew to be devoted to her children. No sightings, no contact, no communication of any kind from Ashley ever surfaced in Virginia or anywhere else in the years that followed, despite the specific, named destination York had offered investigators.

A Name Investigators Already Recognized

As Delaware County authorities dug into Daniel York's background, they found something that immediately deepened their concern. York had already been a person of interest once before, in the November 2010 death of twenty two year old Heather Musick, whose body was discovered in a burned out room at the Budget Inn in Daleville, Indiana, along the Interstate 69 corridor. An autopsy on Musick found carbon monoxide in her blood, indicating she had still been alive and breathing when the fire that killed her broke out, and investigators in that case spent considerable effort trying to determine whether the fire had started accidentally or had been deliberately set. York had retained legal counsel in connection with that investigation and declined to continue cooperating with police, and no charges were ever filed against him or anyone else in Musick's death. Three years later, with a second young woman connected to him now missing under equally troubling circumstances, that earlier case took on a very different weight in the eyes of investigators working Ashley's disappearance. Complicating matters further, Ashley's family later learned that the local sheriff at the time was related to Daniel York, a connection that only added to the family's frustration with how thoroughly the case seemed to be pursued in its earliest days.

A Sudden Death and a Move to Florida

Daniel York died unexpectedly in 2015, roughly two years after Ashley vanished, taking with him whatever firsthand knowledge he had of what actually happened to her. Well before his death, though, he and his wife Sheila had already relocated with Ashley's infant daughter to Florida, despite the fact that paternity between York and the child had never been formally, legally established through any testing. After Daniel's death, court records show that Sheila hired an attorney to represent her late husband's interests in an ongoing paternity proceeding tied to the child, an unusual legal maneuver that a later court filing suggested may have involved presenting Daniel as though he remained an active party to the case well after he had already died. Sheila went on to legally adopt the little girl, and continued raising her, moving at various points from Florida before eventually settling in Weaverville, North Carolina.

An Arrest, a Decade Later

The case sat largely dormant for years, until January 2023, when investigators arrested Sheila York, then sixty six years old, in Buncombe County, North Carolina, charging her with kidnapping and obstruction of justice tied directly to Ashley's now nine year old daughter and the circumstances surrounding how the child had ended up in Sheila's custody. Buncombe County Chief Deputy Jeff Stanley told reporters at the time that Sheila York was considered a person of interest in Ashley's disappearance as well, and that investigators believed she held information relevant to determining what had actually happened to Ashley, information they suspected pointed toward Ashley's death rather than any voluntary relocation to Virginia. Sheila was released on bond following her arrest, and Delaware County authorities pursued a governor's warrant seeking her extradition back to Indiana to face the charges there.

That prosecution did not hold up. In October 2023, a Delaware County judge dismissed the kidnapping charge against Sheila York, ruling that the statute of limitations on the charge had already expired by the time it was filed. Sheila's attorney, Russell Cate, argued more broadly that no crime had occurred at all, framing his client's actions as those of a legitimate adoptive mother rather than a kidnapper, given that paternity between Daniel York and the child had never been legally proven in the first place. Delaware County Prosecutor Eric Hoffman pushed back on the idea that the dismissal reflected anything about the underlying facts of the case, describing it instead as a procedural ruling tied strictly to the timing of when the charge had been filed, and indicated his office intended to explore an appeal through the Indiana Attorney General's Office.

More than a decade after Ashley Elaine Morris Mullis left a family reunion and never came home, no one has ever been charged in connection with her actual disappearance. The man she says gave her fifteen thousand dollars and sent her off to Virginia died without ever answering for the earlier, unresolved death he had already been connected to. His widow was arrested, then saw the case against her collapse on a legal technicality rather than a finding about what she did or didn't know. Ashley's daughter, now a preteen, has grown up entirely within the custody of the family connected to her mother's disappearance, while Ashley herself has never been found, her case still listed as an unsolved, endangered missing person more than ten years on.

Anyone with information about Ashley Elaine Morris Mullis's disappearance is asked to contact the Delaware County Sheriff's Office at 765-747-7781.

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